History of linguistics
The history of linguistics has been built since antiquity by a tradition of ideas and treatises on language such as rhetoric, grammar, philology, morphology and syntax to merge into this science that is included in semiotics and is in turn in social psychology.
Pre-scientific linguistics
Linguistics as an autonomous science, with its own methods and its own object of study, was not consolidated until the 19th century. Previously there had been language studies, the study of the grammar of specific languages and a certain body of generalization about the structure of languages, however, all grammatical terminology was nothing more than a set of reasonable labels, but there was no strictly scientific method to establish the properties of languages, the determination of kinship between them or their phylogenetic affiliation.
During the pre-scientific phase, idiosyncratic and philosophical reflections on the conventional or arbitrary nature of languages, their superiority or perfection, or on their origin were frequent. These pre-scientific questions could not be adequately answered within the framework of pre-scientific linguistics, so they did not go beyond reasonable speculations or sets of valuable but not strictly scientific reflections.
Ancient India
In ancient India the study of language had a long tradition and came to produce rigorous treatises with surprisingly modern ideas. It must be said that the linguistic tradition of ancient India does not consider all languages on an equal footing, as it would in modern linguistics. In this tradition, Sanskrit, a language called “perfect” ("saṃskṛtam" bhaṣa) is opposed to Prakrit (prakṛta 'natural, ordinary, unpolished', a set of colloquial variants that are innovative and less conservative than the archaizing classical Sanskrit).
One of the prominent figures was the grammarian Pāṇini who lived in the kingdom of Gandhāra between the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Pāṇini's work focused on accurately describing the grammar of classical Sanskrit, related to the language used in various sacred texts such as the Rig-veda (the oldest text in India, dating from about around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC). The language Pāṇini describes is often called "classical Sanskrit" while the language used in the similar Rig-Veda though with some slightly different dialectal features is called "Vedic Sanskrit" or simply "Vedic". The Sanskrit described by Pāṇini seems to be a standardization of the written language based on a language prior to the Prakrit, whose first testimonies go back more than a thousand years before our era. It is believed that people stopped speaking Sanskrit in the 3rd century BCE. C. ―the time when the fundamental epic and mythological texts Mahābhārata and Ramayana— were composed and replaced by the Prakrit languages. Pāṇini's grammar has a descriptive character, and it is at this point that it differs from the grammars of the Greeks and from subsequent ones. Pāṇini's most famous work, the Astadhiai, is so called because it consists of eight lessons (adhyaya). The text also summarizes previous linguistic theories, transmitted orally. There is a reason for the admiration of modern philologists, since he reached a perfection in linguistic analysis that was only surpassed a century ago. Pāṇini is commonly believed to have composed his work between the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE. c. Pāṇini's grammatical sutras (treatises) were completed by his successors. Katyayana, author of an extensive collection of critical notes on the work of Pāṇini, called Vartika, deserves a mention.
Ancient Greece
Speculation about language began sporadically among pre-Socratic rhetorical philosophers. Two fundamental questions were discussed: to what extent the language was "natural", and to what extent "conventional"; and to what extent the language is analog (structured and ordered by rules), and to what extent it is anomalous (variable, irregular and unpredictable.) Linguistic issues already appear in some of Plato's dialogues, such as the Cratylus, so it is likely that Socrates was already interested in these issues. Later, Aristotle resumed his interest in language and dealt with linguistic issues related to rhetoric and literary criticism in his works Rhetoric and Poetics . Although Plato and Aristotle were interested in questions of language, it was the philosophers of Stoicism who were the first to recognize linguistics as a separate branch of philosophy.
In Hellenistic times (323 BC to 30 BC), the study of linguistics was necessary, since the empire of Alexander the Great was very extensive and many different languages were spoken within it. For this reason, institutes for the teaching of the Greek language (the official language of the empire) were created, as a means of cohesion and domination of the peoples under Greek influence. Likewise, scholars tried to preserve the levels of Greek grammar and style that had been reached by the great classical authors. Some language scholars turned to literature (such as Dionysius of Thrace); others made more reference to the logical and psychological principles that underlie language.
Roman Antiquity
When Rome came into contact with Greece, traditional grammatical theory was already well developed. Based on Greek grammars, Roman scholars studied, formalized, and structured the study of Latin grammar. There were so many similarities between the two languages, both typological and lexical, that the erroneous idea spread that Latin descended directly from Greek, with some barbaric mixture. It is notorious that although Romans and Greeks had abundant contact with the ancient Persians whose language also shared lexical and grammatical similarities, they never managed to establish a common origin of Persian, Greek and Latin.
Among the Latin grammarians, Marcus Terence Varrón (116-27 BC) stood out for his original contributions. Varro made a long disquisition about the Latin language, in which he investigated its grammar, its history, and its contemporary use. Likewise, he dealt with questions about language in general, such as the controversy between analogy and anomaly. He came to the conclusion that language is analogous, governed by rules; that it is the task of the grammarian to discover and classify those rules; that there are anomalies, but that they are semantic or grammatical and that these must be accepted and recorded, but that it is not part of the grammarian's job to try to improve the structure of the language by challenging established usage. This opinion was quite revolutionary, taking into account the preconceived ideas of the time or the taste for the cultured, literary or archaic forms of the language (frequently considered a better model of the language than its own daily use). From the beginning of the Christian era a large number of Latin grammars appeared. The most important are that of Elio Donato and that of Prisciano.
Medieval Europe
During the Middle Ages, the texts of Donatus and Priscian were essential for the teaching of Latin —the official language of the Western Roman Empire and later of the Church—, on which all education and linguistic studies were based.
In the period known as the Carolingian Renaissance, Priscian's work became increasingly important, until it became the scholarly basis for the teaching of grammar. Around the 12th century, there was a revival of European philosophy at the hands of men like Saint Anselm of Canterbury and Peter Abelard, always within the Church, sole support of education. As a result of the contacts that Europe had with the Greek scholarship of the East, the reading of the texts of Aristotle was resumed, with which the study of Greek was reborn. Thanks to this resurgence, the conception of Latin grammar changed, considered more as a philosophical discipline than didactic and literary.
With grammatical studies controlled by philosophers, it began to be considered as a means of relating language to the human mind. "The theory of language with which speculative grammarians operated embraced three interrelated levels: external reality or ways in which the world exists, its real properties (modi essendi), the capacities of the mind to learn and understand these (modi intelligendi) and the means through which humanity can communicate this understanding (modi significandi)".
The most important contribution of speculative grammar is the theory of universal grammar. Thanks to the study of vernacular languages, grammarians came to the conclusion that all human beings have the ability to learn a language, and that differences are nothing more than accidents. Grammatical studies were left aside, as they were considered of little theoretical interest. The same thing happened with the study of classical Latin texts. However, they were never completely scrapped. And in the Renaissance they were definitively taken up again.
An important figure for his original contributions from this period is Dante Alighieri who in his work De vulgari eloquentia ('On popular language') considers the historical evolution of languages. Dante attributes a common origin to the languages he knew and presupposes that various historical and social processes led to divergent evolutions. This work contains a map compiled by Alighieri where he locates the languages he knows, dividing the European territory into three parts: Greek languages to the east, Germanic languages to the north, and Romance languages to the south. Alighieri classified the Romance languages into three groups (oïl [Old French] languages, oc [Occitan, Provençal, Gascon] languages, and si [the rest] languages). He also tried to classify the fourteen variants that he recognized within the languages of Italy, Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicily. In the second book he defends the use of the vernacular languages of his time for certain literary genres, against the use of Latin as the only learned language.
Modern Age: The Renaissance
In 1492 the first Castilian grammar by Antonio de Nebrija appears, in which the rules of the Castilian language are formally collected and where its author praises the language by comparing it with the Tuscan language praised in turn by Dante Alighieri. Nebrija considers the Spanish language a privileged heir to Latin.
Throughout the XVI century, grammars of vernacular languages (Spanish, French), indigenous languages (Quechua, Nauhatl,), which demonstrates the need for political nationalism, on the one hand, and the Church, on the other, to have an instrument for identification and dissemination respectively. Despite this, interest in the study of Latin did not wane, among other reasons because once Vulgar Latin disappeared as lingua franca, there was an urgent need to rescue Classical Latin as a language during the Renaissance. of culture. At the same time, the interest that the study of vernacular languages has aroused makes possible comparative studies that seek their common and more general features.
A very important fact of the 16th and 17th centuries is the composition of various Language arts or grammars of colloquial languages of American languages, by mainly Spanish, Portuguese and Italian scholars. These studies helped to establish that the European languages, and in particular Latin or ancient Greek, were not representative languages of the world's linguistic diversity.
Modern Age: The Enlightenment
Indeed, during the Renaissance, the emergence of vernacular languages gave rise to the revitalization of research on the perfect or common language. In this line appears the Minerva of the Brocense or the well-known grammar of Port-Royal, which acts as a link between the rationalist theories of the s. XVII and those of the XVIII.
Regarding the origin of language and its relationship with thought, the XVIII century is divided between rationalist and sensible empirical assumptions. Many Enlightenment thinkers are influenced by Cartesian principles that had been expressed, at the semiotic level, in the Grammaire (1660) and La Logique (1692) of Port-Royal.. Authors like Nicolas Beauzée and César Chesneau Dumarsais try to distinguish a perfect isomorphism between language, thought and reality, and many of the discussions on the rationalization of grammar will take place in this line. Against this is the so-called enlightened linguistics, represented by Condillac, for whom all the activity of the soul, in addition to perceptions, comes from the senses. This controversy will reach our days by the hand of Noam Chomsky and his Generative Grammar.
Modern and scientific linguistics
Comparative Linguistics
The artistic fashion of romanticism revived interest in the culture and past of peoples and nations, with their particularities. In the linguistic field, romanticism influenced the study of the origins of languages as an expression of the "soul" or essence of the people. In this context, one of the most appreciated aspects will be that of the national languages as the main expression of the soul of the peoples, hence the resurgence at this time of abundant comparative, ethnographic and descriptive studies related to language. Languages are alive, you want to know what they are like, why they change, what they are really used for, what is their origin. The relationship between the different languages is sought, the laws that explain the analogies, the common and differential elements, etc.
The discovery of Sanskrit stimulated the study of the origin of the languages of Europe. In 1786, William Jones established the idea of the kinship of Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, and the Germanic languages (a kinship that had already been mentioned previously by some authors, in less eloquent terms than those of Jones). Subsequently, in 1816, in a work entitled System of Sanskrit Conjugation, Franz Bopp demonstrated that the relationships and similarities between related languages could be systematized and turned into an autonomous science. But this school, having had the indisputable merit of opening a new and fertile field, did not come to constitute the true linguistic science. He never bothered to determine the nature of his object of study. And without such an elementary operation, a science is incapable of procuring a method.
The first error, and the one that contains in germ all the others, is that in his investigations -limited for the rest to the Indo-European languages- he never asked what the comparisons he established led to, what the relationships meant that I was discovering It was exclusively comparative rather than historical; but, by itself, it does not allow us to reach conclusions. And the conclusions eluded the comparatists, all the more so since the development of two languages was considered as a naturalist would with the crossing of two plants.
It was not until 1870, more or less, that the question of the conditions of the life of languages was raised. It was noticed then that the correspondences that unite them are only one of the aspects of the linguistic phenomenon, that the comparison is only a means, a method to reconstruct the facts.
Linguistics proper, which gave comparison its exact place, arose from the study of Romance and Germanic languages. The Romance studies inaugurated by Friedrich Diez –his Grammar of Romance Languages dates from 1836-1838– particularly contributed to bringing linguistics closer to its true object. And it is that the Romanists were in privileged conditions, unknown to the Indo-Europeans; Latin was known, the prototype of the Romance languages, and then, the abundance of documents made it possible to follow the evolution of languages in detail. These two circumstances limited the field of conjecture and gave the entire investigation a particularly concrete physiognomy. The Germanists were in a similar situation; Proto-Germanic is certainly not directly known, but the history of the languages derived from it can be traced, with the help of numerous documents, through a long series of centuries. And also the Germanists, more attached to reality, arrived at different conceptions from that of the first Indo-Europeans.
A first impulse was due to the American William D. Whitney, the author of The life of language (1875). Soon after, a new school was formed, that of the neogrammarians, led by Germans. Its merit consisted in placing all the results of the comparisons in historical perspective, and thus linking the facts in their natural order. Thanks to the neogrammarians, language was no longer seen as an organism that developed by itself, but as a product of the collective spirit of linguistic groups. At the same time it was understood how erroneous and insufficient were the ideas of comparative philology and grammar.
Beginnings of Scientific Linguistics
Modern linguistics has its beginning in the 19th century with the activities of those known as neogrammarians, who, thanks to the discovery of Sanskrit, they were able to compare the languages and reconstruct a supposed original language, Proto-Indo-European (which is not a real language, but a theoretical construction). Although the historical linguistics of the neogrammarians' approach was a systematization of linguistic facts and resorted to scientifically justified theoretical principles, the neogrammatical orthodoxy incurred in exaggerations about the regularity of phonetic correspondences and fell into an unfounded optimism about the possibility of reconstructing the original protolanguages of humanity.
Dialectology also emerged during the XIX century, it set out to investigate the existing variety of spoken languages, investigating the distribution Geography of linguistic features. Various results of dialectology seriously questioned some of the principles of the neogrammarians and to a great extent qualified the concept of strict phonetic law, which the neogrammarians had proposed.
However, neither dialectology nor comparative grammar took the fundamental step of theorizing about the principles of language. While they established research methods on both historical and geographic variation in languages and brought scientific principles to light, they did not go beyond the realm of individual languages or language families.
Structuralism
Structuralism is the first theoretical attempt to systematize linguistic facts by adequately proposing a framework where linguistic facts could be reflected on outside of specific languages and ideas that were properly linguistic were proposed.
With these precedents and the impulse of the structuralist current that takes over the methodology applied to the social and ethnographic sciences, the figure of the Swiss Ferdinand de Saussure arises, who points out the insufficiencies of comparativism while clearly delimiting the object of study of linguistics as a science —which it integrates into a broader discipline, semiology, which in turn forms part of social psychology—, namely, the functioning of signs in social life, in its "General Linguistics Course", a posthumous edition of his university lectures carried out by his students.
The fundamental contribution of Saussure as father of the new science was the distinction between language (system) and speech (realization), and the definition of linguistic sign (meaning and signifier). However, his approach —known as structuralist and which we can describe, in opposition to later currents, as empiricist— will be called into question at the moment when he had already given most of its fruits and therefore its limitations were more highlighted.
The first phase of the structuralist approach was dominated by European authors, which is why it is known as European structuralism. Anthropological studies carried out in Africa and especially the Americas have considerably expanded the body of linguistic evidence on which to theorize. Many of these works contributed to American structuralism, one of whose main exponents is Leonard Bloomfield.
Generative Grammar
In the XX century, the American linguist Noam Chomsky created the current known as generativism. With the irruption of this school of brilliant success, since the explanatory limitations of the structuralist approach were evident, there is a displacement of the focus attention shifting from language as a system (the Saussurian langue) to language as a product of the speaker's mind, the innate ability to learn and use a language (the competence i> Chomskian). According to Chomsky, the ability to learn a language is genetic. He raises a fundamental question: Plato's argument: how is it possible for human beings to learn such a complex system (based on hierarchies) from such poor and incomplete stimuli? That is to say, the person who has learned a language is capable of formulating sentences that he has never heard before, because he knows the rules according to which the sentences must be formed. This knowledge is not acquired through habit (it would be impossible) but rather it is an innate capacity. Every human being that is born already carries this capacity, which is Universal Grammar, grammatical rules that govern all languages equally.
Any proposal for a linguistic model must therefore —according to the generativist school— be adapted to the global problem of the study of the human mind, which leads to always seeking the mental realism of what is proposed; that is why generativism has been described as a mentalist or rationalist school.
Functionalism
Both the Chomskian and the Saussurean schools aim to describe and explain language as an autonomous, isolated system. Thus they collide —both equally— with a school that gained strength at the end of the XX century and is known as functionalist. In opposition to it, the traditional Chomskian and Saussurian schools are jointly called formalists. Functionalist authors —some of whom come from anthropology or sociology— consider that language cannot be studied without taking into account its main function: human communication. The most relevant figure within this trend is perhaps the Dutch linguist Simon C. Dik, author of the book Functional Grammar. This functionalist position brings linguistics closer to the social realm, giving importance to pragmatics, change and linguistic variation.
Other approaches
Late 20th century and early XXI, in addition to the generativist (dominant) and functionalist approaches, there appear numerous typological studies based on corpus, statistics, and algorithms that seek statistical correlations between linguistic parameters with each other and between linguistic parameters and factors external. Attempts at mathematical linguistics and quantitative studies and the search for linguistic universals are developed, which although they frequently constitute a certain heterogeneity, provide non-trivial evidence that is not the object of direct interest by generativism or functionalism.
In addition, the attempt to connect purely linguistic aspects with human physiology or social dynamics gives rise to psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Likewise, computational linguistics and formal languages have created perspectives that have much in common with the contents of linguistics.
Positivism in the 21st century
Auguste Comte
French philosopher establishes for the first time the term Positivism which unleashes some discussions within the group of scientists, despite this his philosophy is widely accepted during the century XIX. It arises at times when religion is not capable of demonstrating the various questions of scientists, philosophers and researchers of the time, thus its contributions are very influential in subsequent thoughts until the century XXI. Many authors refer that the positivism of Auguste Comte is not current, however in this article the opposite can be referred to. An enormous influence of Comtism and German thought in the construction of current dominant knowledge is highlighted. In the year 1798, not only was one of the staunchest Sociologists born, but with it a whole range of positivist thoughts seemed to be designed, concretized in the realization of an a posteriori approach, experience being the basis of knowledge and the possibility of a supposedly better science. through a positivist philosophy that serves as a model in the reality of many countries. Comte's ideas are not only those knowledge of past centuries but also the construction of a thought so well developed to this day in many areas of knowledge. The questions of dynamic and static showed great attachment to Comte's positivism, the synchronic and diachronic later coined by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Utopia of a real science of language
Comte's presence also answered some questions raised by thinkers about language. William D. Whitney appears as a figure in linguistics strictly influenced by Augustus Comte. In his approach he thought that just as knowledge could go through three stages, linguistics would also go through this, in it he proposed a theological stage that takes language as a divine gift from God, metaphysics that goes beyond the people who speak and therefore last the positive stage through induction. If we currently think about a real science of language based on a subject-object from a silencing perspective of language, it will continue to be a utopia, for this reason it will be a false science of language characterized by its obfuscating capacity, however, if there is the possibility of understanding through mastery of reality itself.
Criticism of Comtism
The design can be known for its history. When Comte mentions history he is referring to theology and metaphysics, the liberation from the chains of the past. On the other hand, if we see an approach to the different histories of the cultures in the world, the past would not be a heavy chain but a part of the future, that is, the above can be seen ahead. We are and will be in some way what we were in the past. Therefore it is essential that we remember this for an understanding of the complexity of knowledge and the world. Albert Einstein German philosopher was a model of Comte's ideas, the theory of relativity. Positivism affirmed itself as the final point of human knowledge, crediting itself to be the true one, an argument that is still valid for many who sow the ideology of universality and superiority, a universality not in terms of natural things in common which are recognized and could not be denied. There is no way to deny oneself but rather that which makes the other invisible.
Current positivist education
The concern about the continuation of the exclusive universal thought before the native peoples. Within the policies of the university and other levels of education that are extremely exclusive, they are the subject of critical analysis. There is a need to practice pedagogies that encourage possibilities of being, being, thinking, feeling, existing, doing, looking, listening and knowing in another way. Pedagogy as an essential methodology for epistemic liberation struggles. The fights as pedagogical scenarios because there they show their learning, unlearning, relearning, reflection and action. The unfinished project of decolonization as proposals in the universities of the country. The teacher can expand his indispensable methodology to train students who are not limited to fields of university education in order to create a methodological presence as Freire says. Create a type of pedagogy that provides a new humanity.